Hi, I'm Kathryn. Welcome to American Elsewhere.

 

I started keeping blogs a few years ago when someone I knew suggested using one for writing practice. It was a sound idea: I write all the time, always have, but "all the time" doesn't translate to "well" as often as I would like. Now that I've been kindly-if-firmly put on medical leave from college, I have the time to work on this some more. 

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Did you know that "blog" comes from "web log"? I hadn't known that for a long time. It kind of seemed to me that the word "blog" came out of this sea of pop culture and pop consciousness like Godzilla rising from the waves, formed by some technobabble and nuclear power, to arrive formed and understood in the English dictionary. It's neat. I enjoy etymology, language, slang, linguistics, history. Private detetive work for words.

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Being on medical leave from college has its advantages. I miss Wellesley, which has been my home for some of the worst years of my life, emphasis on "home," and I don't miss Wellesley, which has been my home for some of the worst years of my life, emphasis on "worst years of my life."

 

I go into Boston several times a week to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center to work on my particular cocktail of brain problems. Two types of depression, experienced simultaneously: major depressive disorder and dysthymia. In layman's terms, for me, even when it's good it's gloomy. We're puzzling out other complications, my superheroine team-up of my psychologist and my psychiatrist and myself. Obsessions and compulsions. Difficulty with emotions and empathy. Disassociation. The quiet if persistant conviction that everybody around me is fundamentally unreal, somehow inhuman, possibly a robot from another world.

 

It helps to joke about some of this stuff.

 

Beyond that I write my stories, order my library of fiction and non-fiction, and take care of my guinea pigs. They have been my squeaky friends throughout my depression. I have eleven of them, thanks to a case of mistaken gender and the multiplication process of mammals.

 

I'm a young bisexual woman, a mentally ill woman, and a psychology and philosophy double major in Limbo. I own more than 60 Stephen King novels. I'm a devout Germano-Celtic Polytheist Reconstructionist Pagan and have been for years; while I was at Swelles I ran the Pagan Gatherings. Even got an altar set up for all the Pagan students to use despite administrative evasive manuevering.

 

I value my religion. It has exponentially increased the amount of time I spend on the JStor search engine and the amount of binders stacked on my desk over the years, but I love it as much as I love anything.

 

I study German. I study other languages too, but my parents have been trying to teach German to me on and off ever since I was little, and it has a certain significance for me. By now I'm pretty okay with it. I'm trying to get better. It's a language I had hoped to share with my kids one day. The photographs next to this meandering get-to-know-me sequence are from Berlin, Germany. The top one is from the East Side Gallery. The others are graffiti. A surprising amount of Berlin graffiti is written in English. I was studying abroad there for two weeks of what was apparently the coldest, darkest winter on record in twenty years. Still nicer than January in New England.

 

That was the third paragraph in a row that I began with "I," so we're going to talk about bees for a bit. Bees are an important part of the ecosystem: the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that honeybees pollinate more than $20 billion worth of crops every year. But bees get cooler. A toxin in their venom called melittin may help prevent HIV, according to scientists at Washington University in St. Louis. Because of the space-and-time-continuum-defying nature of bee brains, scientists at Arizona State University are holding out hope that their research with bees can help slow the onset of human dementia. Research with cocaine and bees (an actual study someone got passed the ethics review board) may help scientists puzzle out the fine details of addiction. Jack and I talked about being beekeepers. But that's a fact about myself, not about bees, and I was trying not to upstage the bees. Sorry, bees.

 

I've mentioned already that this blog has a goofy name, but there's some meaning in its goofiness. My fiancé, Jack, tea brewer extraordinnaire, once described the genre of works I like to watch, read, and write about as "The Tarantino Peaks Files." The name draws from three sources: Quentin Tarantino, whose quirky violent films Jack and I have taken to watching together as an ideal couple's bonding activity; Twin Peaks, an eerie early 90s television show that mixes police procedure with suspence, offbeat comedy, and supernatural horror; and the X-Files, another television show detailing two FBI agents' search for the truth about any American urban legend they could get their hands on.
I thought that it suited my first serious blog - if I can count a blog where I confess that I've watched a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Mothman as serious - very well. Other contenders were Kathryn's Snog (Snail Blog), Eleven Guinea Pigs And Counting, and Adventures With A Mental Illness That Convinces You That You Are Going To Kill Yourself Once You Finish College, So Why Take Calculus When You Can Take Early Medieval History? and none of those really had the same ring. Also, Jack coined it, and I will admit that was a point in its favor. I'm rather fond of Jack.

 

So I've confessed to watching a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Mothman. I have something even worse to confess: in a fit of supervillain theatrics I had Jack watch the entire thing with me. I'm telling you this because I'm about to tell you that I am twenty-two and engaged, and if you're anything like the Sister who serves as the Catholic chaplain at my college you're going to hop out of your chair and shout "WHAT!" when I do. Or maybe you won't. Maybe I'm being too defensive. Maybe I seem like I'm trying too hard to be special. You could spend your life on maybes and come up broke. I've just been kind of taken aback by the intense reactions Jack and I have gotten, and even though I am on one side of the screen and you are on another, it seemed like I should brace both of us for that. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe Elvis really isn't dead. Who knows? 

 

I'm married He's three years my junior, Canadian, and already the master of Dad jokes. He willingly agreed to sit through a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Mothman with me, and if that's not love, then I don't know what is. 

 

So this is my blog. Look around, read some things, and support the dwindling bee population. They're important.